quote:Originally posted by Three Bagger:
I think your last sentence hit the nail on the head whether it be for youth baseball or professional in that the new programs, sabermatics etc. are disproving a lot of long held beliefs, one example of which is the value of the sacrifice bunt in most situations. I recently joined SABR and love the statistical side of baseball as much as I enjoy watching the game. Keep up the good work!
Its really too bad that in the past so many people, usually coaches, felt somehow threatened by the numbers, but I believe that the current generation of coaches has come a long way into the “light” of truth and reality, and the next one will be even better about it. The trouble is, for every question the numbers answer, or beliefs they either prove or disprove, more questions come up, and we never seem to run out of myths.
What I’m finding more and more, is that many of the long held beliefs and/or myths have come to be simply because there was such a dearth of numbers. There’s always been a few dads or coaches who have tried to do a good job of developing the numbers for their teams, but what was rare, was anyone keeping them from year to year, or to combine them into one database where different metrics can be run, but because of so many more data points, the results become more and more reliable.
Now there are more and more people trying to do it, and venues to make it happen. At the HS level, MaxPreps has really made an imprint. There have always been places where teams could send some basic stats so they could be compared to other teams and players, but in general it was pretty localized. IOW, someone using a stat service in NC couldn’t see what was goin’ on in Ca.. That’s the kind of thing that provides skewed outlooks people develop.
But when MaxPreps went national several years back, a whole new world of information opened up. Other than the obvious scouting implications, it can really be humbling to have your son be a league leader, but find out he’s little more than just one of 5,000 really good players in the state, let alone the country. And now, with several years of data history, its much easier to get a real read on that history.
What I like about this new wave of data availability is, rather than just getting the same old stats of ERA and BA, its not unusual to find things like ROEs and Pitch Counts being able to be tracked. IOW, things are getting better.
